Sentence Formulation Research Articles

Dissociating Cerebellar Regions Involved in Formulating and Articulating Words and Sentences.

We investigated which parts of the cerebellum are involved in formulating and articulating sentences using (i) a sentence production task that involved describing simple events in pictures; (ii) an auditory sentence repetition task involving the same sentence articulation but not sentence formulation; and (iii) an auditory sentence-to-picture matching task that involved the same pictorial events and no overt articulation. Activation for each of these tasks was compared to the equivalent word processing tasks: noun production, verb production, auditory noun repetition, and auditory noun-to-picture matching. We associate activation in bilateral cerebellum lobule VIIb with sequencing words into sentences because it increased for sentence production compared to all other conditions and was also activated by word production compared to word matching. We associate a paravermal part of right cerebellar lobule VIIIb with overt motor execution of speech, because activation was higher during (i) production and repetition of sentences compared to the corresponding noun conditions and (ii) noun and verb production compared to all matching tasks, with no activation relative to fixation during any silent (nonspeaking) matching task. We associate activation within right cerebellar Crus II with covert articulatory activity because it activated for (i) all speech production more than matching tasks and (ii) sentences compared to nouns during silent (nonspeaking) matching as well as sentence production and sentence repetition. Our study serendipitously segregated, for the first time, three distinct functional roles for the cerebellum in generic speech production, and it demonstrated how sentence production enhanced the demands on these cerebellar regions.

Improving Teacher Performance in Developing Teaching ModulesBased on Kurikulum Merdeka through Academic Supervision

The subjects in this study were teachers of SMAN 15 Tanjung Jabung Barat, 2023/2024 academic year. There are 15 teachers at SMAN 15 Tanjung Jabung Barat. Of the 15 teachers, 11 teachers who teach in class X. Because the implementation of the Sekolah Penggerak program is only in class X. Activities are focused on 11 teachers who teach Class X with the Merdeka Curriculum. The difference in action in each cycle is in the type of use of supervision techniques. The academic supervision technique used in cycle I was a group technique, and in cycle II it was an individual technique through peer empowerment. If after two cycles the PTS objectives have not been achieved, the sub-techniques of the two techniques are used variably. The researcher can conclude that the performance of teachers at SMAN 15 Tanjung Jabung Barat in preparing Teaching Modules based on the Merdeka Curriculum is significantly improved through optimizing academic supervision with peer reinforcement. The implementation of individual techniques as an intensification of peer assistance is carried out in five steps applied by researchers to teachers whose performance is still low, or certain difficulties such as in the formulation of triggering sentences and assessments. In cycle II, the achievement of the MA section continued to increase. In the information section 97, then the core section reached 77, 80, 70, 63, and 77. The core competency section reached 70, 70, 80, 67, 67, 73, 70, and 87. The assessment section reached 70, 67, and 70. The enrichment section reached 70, 77. The reflection section reached 67 and 60. The appendix section reached 67, 73, and 63. Bibliography reached 73. The predicate in Cycle II no longer has the predicate not suitable, less suitable becomes 13%, the appropriate predicate appears at 87%.

Scat Singing Learning Method in Jazz Vocals for Vocal Students of Music Presentation Institut Seni Indonesia Yogyakarta

Scat singing is the designation of vocal improvisation techniques in jazz music. This form of vocal improvisation was first popularized by Louis Armstrong in 1962. Scat singing is often learned by imitating improvised musical instruments into vocals, such as saxophones, trumpets, guitars, or pianos. Popjazz vocal students of the ISI Yogyakarta Music Presentation study program began to be introduced and learned scat singing from semester 2 to semester 6. Only a few students successfully apply this vocal improvisation technique when singing in performances and jam sessions. The author as a lecturer of popjazz vocal practice in the Music Presentation Study Program has observed the difficulties experienced by the majority of students. Several stages of learning have been applied in the learning process, for example by understanding scales and chord patterns, developing the main melody in songs, enriching vocal dialects, to multiplying musical references. This stage of learning was not significantly successful in helping students master scat singing. This study aims to formulate a learning method of vocal improvisation techniques for scat singing. The data collection process is carried out by observing the learning process during lectures, interviews with students, and regular singing practice. Inductive qualitative data analysis, which is an analysis based on the data obtained then developed a certain relationship pattern or hypothesis. The research was conducted by qualitative methods, with the final result being a descriptive sentence formulation of steps to master the vocal improvisation technique of scat singing. This conclusion is expected to be an overview for lecturers in order to determine the right approach to help students master scat singing and dare to apply it in songs.

CLARITY OF REGULATORY OBJECTIVES REGARDING PRESIDENTIAL APPROVAL IN THE FORMATION OF MINISTERIAL / HEAD OF INSTITUTION REGULATIONS

As the holder of power in the administration of government based on the constitution, the president has set a new policy, namely regarding the mechanism for granting presidential approval to draft regulations of ministers or heads of institutions. With the birth of this arrangement, every policy of ministers or heads of institutions with certain criteria must obtain presidential approval before being determined. The mechanism carried out after harmonization has indirectly obscured the stage of forming laws and regulations that are prevalent today. With juridical normative research methods that use statutory, conceptual, and historical approaches, it was found that the arrangement for granting presidential approval actually brought back classic problems. The arrangement is harmonized with other regulations. There is vagueness in sentence formulation, use of words, terms, or phrases, which causes multiple interpretations. The arrangement also comes out of the national policy framework related to simplifying regulations promoted by the president himself. In its formation, there is also the possibility of the influence of bureaucratic political practices or competition among state administrative work units in finding alternative solutions to problems that arise in society.

Morphosemantic treatment of inflection of verb tense in Persian-speaking aphasic patients with agrammatism: a single-subject study

ABSTRACT Background The production of verb inflection, especially tense marking, is commonly impaired in persons with agrammatic aphasia. In Persian, verbs are inflected in three tenses the past, present, and future, and play a key role in the sentence.A group of theories attributes verb inflection errors to syntactic or semantic deficits in sentence formulation. Aims The present study intends to investigate the effect of morphosemantic treatment on the inflection of regular and irregular verbs in the past, present, and future tenses in Persian-speaking agrammatic participants. Methods & Procedure A single-subject study with an ABA design was performed to evaluate the effect of morphosemantic treatment on four Persian-speaking agrammatic participants. In the current study, in addition to presenting descriptive statistics and visual analysis, percent of non-overlapping data (PND) was used to determine whether there was an effect of intervention during the treatment phase, and d1 statistics of effect size analysis was used to determine whether there was a maintenance effect during the withdrawal phase. Outcomes & Results All participants demonstrated significant improvement in the trained regular and irregular tenses and generalized to the production of tense morphology on untrained regular and irregular verbs. The effect of therapy was maintained for a three-week follow-up. Also, the morphosemantic intervention was associated with an increase in most narrative measures and language tests scores. Conclusions Therapy for verb inflection in spontaneous speech is clinically important. The current study demonstrated that morphosemantic intervention could be successfully used for tense marker deficits in Persian-speaking participants with aphasia and agrammatism.

Sentence formulation is easier when thematic and syntactic prominence align: evidence from psych verbs

ABSTRACT We use the visual world eye-tracking paradigm to investigate how the mapping from thematic event structures to grammatical structures, known as sentence formulation, unfolds during real time sentence production. Experiment 1 contrasted production of SubjExp (“LeslieEXP loves AnnSTIM”) versus ObjExp (“LeslieSTIM scares AnnEXP”) sentences. Experiment 2 investigated passivized SubjExp (“LeslieSTIM was loved by AnnEXP”) and passivized ObjExp sentences (“LeslieEXP was scared by AnnSTIM.”). In both studies, we found that speakers were faster to begin speaking and to preferentially fixate the subject when they were able to assign the thematically prominent Experiencer role to the subject of the sentence. We conclude that sentence formulation is easier when speakers can make use of a tight, systematic correspondence between event structures and linguistic structures. We discuss the implications of our work for the relationship between language and thought and for the formal accounts of SubjExp and ObjExp verbs.

GENERIC APPROACH OF MEASURING TEXT SEMANTIC SIMILARITY

Text Semantic Similarity can be viewed as one of the challenging tasks as evident from current profound interest in NLP research community that has created achievable milestones through active participation in SemEval task series of the recent decade. Amidst these developments, it was realized that exploring text to compare its semantics largely depends on valid grammatical structures of sentences and sentence formulation types. In this paper, the computation of text semantic similarity is addressed by devising a novel set of generic similarity metrics based on both, word-sense of the phrases constituting the text as well as the grammatical layout and sequencing of these word-phrases forming text with sensible meaning. We have used the combination of word-sense and grammatical similarity metrics over benchmark sentential datasets. Having obtained highest value of Pearson’s correlation coefficient (0.89) with mean human similarity scores, when compared against equivalent scores obtained through closely competent structured approach models, plagiarism-detection classification task was revisited on well-known paragraph-phrased Rewrite corpus articulated by Clough and Stevenson (2011) using our model to provide generic utility perspective to these novel devised similarity metrics. Here also, nearly competent classification model performance (with accuracy 76.8%) encouraged authors to work in directions that are more promising where the performance can be enhanced by improving upon dependency (grammatical relations) component in order to raise the count of true-positives and false-negatives.

The Agreement of Complex Sentence and its Meanings in the Last Quarter of Holy Quran- Selected Models

This study is entitled (The Structural Agreement of Complex Sentence and its Meanings in the Last Quarter of Holy Quran - Selected Models) the Noble Qur’an through the varying linguistic methods that are relied upon in the formulation of sentences and texts, and among these methods: (constructive) which does not bear truth and lies in and of itself. Given the importance of this topic, the study came as an application to the last quarter of the Holy Qur’an; To reveal the manifestations of the rhetorical inimitability in it, as well as to find the connotations contained in the construction methods in different rhetorical contexts, and these methods are characterized by their various suggestive and semantic ability that vary in the diversity of the tools and contexts of the method. The research includes a study of the imperative construction represented in the style of (the command, the prohibition, the question, the wish, and the call), a theoretical and applied study at the same time.

The Critical Role of Semantic Working Memory in Language Comprehension and Production

Although research on the role of verbal working memory (WM) in language processing has focused on phonological maintenance, considerable evidence indicates that the maintenance of semantic information plays a more critical role. This article reviews studies of brain-damaged and healthy individuals demonstrating the contribution of semantic WM to language processing. On the sentence-comprehension side, semantic WM supports the retention of individual word meanings prior to their integration. It also serves to maintain semantic information in an activated state such that semantic interference between sentence constituents can be resolved. Phonological WM does not appear to support either of these functions, though it contributes to verbatim sentence recall. On the production side, evidence points to the phrase as the minimal scope of advance planning in sentence formulation, and to semantic WM as supporting the representation of the meanings of the content words within a phrase. Planning at the phonological level appears to have a very limited scope, making few demands on phonological WM. These findings imply that treatment of semantic but not phonological WM deficits should lead to improved sentence comprehension and production, and preliminary findings support that view.

The Influence of Portuguese Syntax on the Learning of English as a Foreign Language: The Case of Null Subject

This research deals with the influence of Portuguese syntax on the learning of English as a Foreign Language, specifically the null subject parameter. This paper aims at seeing the influence of Portuguese syntax on the learning of English, mainly the influence of Portuguese phonological null subjects in the pupils’ formulation of English sentences. An additional goal is to verify whether Portuguese syntax, especially the null Portuguese Subject had an influence on the 11th-graders’ formulation of the English sentences. In this respect, it was hypothesized that if there is L1 possibility of null subject transfer in the formulation of English sentences, then 11th-graders will often drop the English subject; It is expected that 11th-graders of “Class B8” outperform those of “Class B7” as far as the English subject is concerned. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were adopted. On the other hand, the statistical tests used in this research in order to verify the invalidation or validation of hypotheses are the t-test and the matched t-test. From the investigation conducted in this research, it was found that all the eleventh-graders to whom the test was subjected omitted the subject in their formulation of the English sentences.

Tipovi jezičkih odstupanja u pisanom diskursu učenika mlađeg osnovnoškolskog uzrasta: TIMSS 2019 u Srbiji

The analysis of language characteristics of pupils’ written discourse indi- cates, among other things, the functional application of the acquired knowledge of the Ser- bian language and provides the insight into the quality of their language literacy necessary for the acquisition and application of knowledge in various scientific disciplines. The aim of the paper is to examine the linguistic characteristics (types of deviations) in pupils’ answers to certain textual tasks regarding natural sciences in the TIMSS 2019 in Serbia. Moreover, we aim to establish to what extent the linguistic characteristics (types of deviations) of the answers reflect the standards of school achievement for the analysed age. The answers of three hundred pupils to three open-ended tasks from natural sciences have been analysed (each task belongs to one of the three examined areas in the TIMSS 2019). Pupils’ language literacy has been assessed by the qualitative analysis of the content of their answers at the orthographic, grammatical/syntactic, and lexical-semantic level. The observed deviations refer to: inadequate application of spelling rules, formulation of clear and precise sentences, insufficiently developed ability to understand the meaning and the use of the words that belong to the general lexical system, indicating insufficiently developed linguistic literacy of the pupils. The types of language deviations in the analysed answers mostly concern the requirements prescribed for the basic and intermediate level of educational standards of achievement when these characteristics are considered in the context of educational standards for the end of the first cycle of education for the subject Serbian language. The obtained findings indicate that more attention should be paid to language expression when teaching all school subjects in junior grades of elementary school. Additionally, it is necessary to revise national standards which will support the development of functional literacy, i.e. the competencies relevant to the knowledge society.

Speaking like a scientist: A multiple case study on sketch and speak intervention to improve expository discourse.

This descriptive multiple case study examined the effects of a contextualized expository strategy intervention on supported and independent note-taking, verbal rehearsal, and reporting skills for three elementary students with language disorders. Two 9-year-old fourth grade students and one 11-year-old sixth grade student with language disorders participated. The intervention was delivered as sixteen individual 20-minute sessions across nine weeks by the school speech-language pathologist. Students learned to take written and pictographic notes from expository texts and use verbal formulation and rehearsal of individual sentences and whole reports in varied learning contexts. To explore both emergent and independent accomplishments, performance was examined in final intervention session presentations and pre/post intervention testing. Following the intervention, all three students effectively used notes and verbal rehearsal to prepare and present fluent, organized, accurate, confident oral reports to an audience. From pre- to post-test, the students showed a range of improvements in the quality of notes, use of verbal rehearsal, holistic quality of oral and written reporting, and strategy awareness. Sketch and Speak shows potential as an expository intervention for students who struggle with academic language learning. The results support further examination of this intervention for supported strategy use by younger students and independent use by older students.

Factor Analysis of Spontaneous Speech in Aphasia.

Purpose Spontaneous speech tasks are critically important for characterizing spoken language production deficits in aphasia and for assessing the impact of therapy. The utility of such tasks arises from the complex interaction of linguistic demands (word retrieval, sentence formulation, articulation). However, this complexity also makes spontaneous speech hugely variable and difficult to assess. The current study aimed to simplify the problem by identifying latent factors underlying performance in spontaneous speech in aphasia. The ecological validity of the factors was examined by examining how well the factor structures corresponded to traditionally defined aphasia subtypes. Method A factor analysis was conducted on 17 microlinguistic measures of narratives from 274 individuals with aphasia in AphasiaBank. The resulting factor scores were compared across aphasia subtypes. Supervised (linear discriminant analysis) and unsupervised (latent profile analysis) classification techniques were then conducted on the factor scores and the solutions compared to traditional aphasia subtypes. Results Six factors were identified. Two reflected aspects of fluency, one at the phrase level (Phrase Building) and one at the narrative level (Narrative Productivity). Two other factors reflected the accuracy of productions, one at the word level (Semantic Anomaly) and one at the utterance level (Grammatical Error). The other two factors reflected the complexity of sentence structures (Grammatical Complexity) and the use of repair behaviors (Repair), respectively. Linear discriminant analyses showed that only about two thirds of speakers were classified correctly and that misclassifications were similar to disagreements between clinical diagnoses. The most accurately diagnosed syndromes were the largest groups-Broca's and anomic aphasia. The latent profile analysis also generated profiles similar to Broca's and anomic aphasia but separated some subtypes according to severity. Conclusions The factor solution and the classification analyses reflected broad patterns of spontaneous speech performance in a large and representative sample of individuals with aphasia. However, such data-driven approaches present a simplified picture of aphasia patterns, much as traditional syndrome categories do. To ensure ecological validity, a hybrid approach is recommended, balancing population-level analyses with examination of performance at the level of theoretically specified subgroups or individuals. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.13232354.

Agentive versus non-agentive motions immediately influence event apprehension and description: an eye-tracking study in a VOS language

The embodied cognition hypothesis postulates that human cognition is fundamentally grounded in our experience of interacting with the physical world (Barsalou in Behav Brain Sci 22:577–609, 1999). Research has shown bi-directional associations between physical action and the processes of understanding language: language comprehension seems to activate implied visual and motor components (Zwaan and Taylor in J Exp Psychol Gen 135(1):1–11, 2006), and action behavior seems to facilitate the comprehension of associated action-language (Beilock et al. in Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 105:13269–13273, 2008). Although numerous research studies have reported a link between action and language comprehension, the exact nature of their association remains subject to debate (Chatterjee in Lang Cognit 2:79–116, 2010). Moreover, the role of action in the production of language is under-explored, as are general language production processes in Austronesian languages. The endangered Austronesian language Truku provides typological patterns that are both under-examined in psycholinguistic research and informative for questions of language production. Truku allows flexibility in the relative location of verbs versus arguments in sentence production, and uses a symmetrical voice system that marks the prominence of different participants in an event. Working with native speakers of Truku, we tested whether performing physical motions immediately affects the conceptual saliency of the components represented in a to-be-described event in ways that guide speakers’ visual attention and shape their utterance formulation. More specifically, we investigated whether speakers’ engagement as an agent or patient in a non-speech physical action affects initial eye-fixations on agent versus patient participants in a visual scene, as well as word order and grammatical voice choices in the speakers’ descriptions of simple transitive events. The results revealed significant effects of physical action on the relative location and prominence of agents in subsequent sentence formulation, and on online patterns of eye fixations. These results provide further support for language-action connections in cognitive processing, and shed light on the cross-linguistic patterns of sentence production.

Diagnóstico de actividades didácticas en el aprendizaje del idioma en los niños de educación básica.

El objetivo de la presente investigación, fue realizar un diagnóstico de actividades didácticas en el aprendizaje del idioma de los niños de educación básica sexto y séptimo grado de la Escuela García Moreno del barrio del Batán de la ciudad de Riobamba. Para ello, se aplicó un conjunto de actividades didácticas orientadas a la evaluación de las destrezas de listening, reading speaking y writing del idioma inglés, tales como: organizadores, mentefactos, formulación de oraciones, actividades de sugestión, diálogos, etc. La investigación fue enfocada sobre la aplicación de un proceso pedagógico en el aprendizaje de inglés, siendo de tipo descriptiva, bibliográfica de campo y explicativa aplicada en una población y muestra de 5 docentes y 44 estudiantes con similar nivel de conocimientos del idioma inglés. Para la recolección de datos se utilizaron las técnicas de las encuestas y el test. La información recolectada fue tabulada y representada mediante tablas y gráficos estadísticos para luego analizarla e interpretarla. Los resultados permitieron establecer que la diversificación de las actividades permitió motivar a los estudiantes en las competencias comunicacionales. Así también sirve como una línea base del proceso pedagógico del desarrollado del aprendizaje del idioma inglés para la aplicación de propuestas, mediante estrategias orientadas a definir incidencias o mejoras.

Automated Scoring of Clinical Expressive Language Evaluation Tasks.

Many clinical assessment instruments used to diagnose language impairments in children include a task in which the subject must formulate a sentence to describe an image using a specific target word. Because producing sentences in this way requires the speaker to integrate syntactic and semantic knowledge in a complex manner, responses are typically evaluated on several different dimensions of appropriateness yielding a single composite score for each response. In this paper, we present a dataset consisting of non-clinically elicited responses for three related sentence formulation tasks, and we propose an approach for automatically evaluating their appropriateness. Using neural machine translation, we generate correct-incorrect sentence pairs to serve as synthetic data in order to increase the amount and diversity of training data for our scoring model. Our scoring model uses transfer learning to facilitate automatic sentence appropriateness evaluation. We further compare custom word embeddings with pre-trained contextualized embeddings serving as features for our scoring model. We find that transfer learning improves scoring accuracy, particularly when using pre-trained contextualized embeddings.

Encoding actions and verbs: Tracking the time-course of relational encoding during message and sentence formulation.

Two experiments tracked the encoding of relational information (actions at the level of the prelinguistic message and verbs at the level of the sentence) during formulation of transitive event descriptions (e.g., The tiger is scratching the photographer). At what point during message and sentence formulation do speakers encode actions and verbs? Participants described pictures of transitive events in response to neutral questions ("What is happening?"), agent questions ("What is [the agent] doing?"), and patient questions ("What is happening with [the patient]?"). The agent and patient questions were intended to change the message-level focus of speakers' responses and to induce priority encoding of the event action and the sentence verb. The questions had a nearly categorical effect on speakers' choice of sentence form in their responses (characters mentioned in the questions were produced in subject position, as expected) and a strong effect on the time-course of sentence formulation: Speakers rapidly directed their gaze to the part of the event needed to encode contextually new, task-relevant information-first the event action and the sentence verb, then the sentence object. The distribution of fixations during the "verb-encoding" window showed that speakers encode relational information by fixating both event characters. Comparing formulation of sentences describing events with action-informative agents and action-informative patients showed a small preference for fixating the more informative character both immediately after picture onset (message-level encoding) and during the verb-encoding window (sentence-level encoding). The results identify action-specific and verb-specific eye movement signatures in message and sentence formulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

On comparing manual and automatic generated textual descriptions of business process models

AbstractSeveral organizations maintain textual process descriptions alongside graphical process descriptions to make them usable for all stakeholders. Maintaining textual process descriptions in the presence of continuously changing processes is a labor‐intensive task. Therefore, the automatic generation of textual descriptions is desirable. However, the trade‐offs between the manual and automatic generation of descriptions are yet to be investigated. To that end, this paper aims to answer two vital questions. How similar are the descriptions generated by the two approaches? What is the impact of using the two types of descriptions on process matching? To answer these specific questions, we have generated textual descriptions of 552 process models using the two approaches. To answer the first question, we have applied six text‐matching techniques and established that the descriptions overlap significantly; however, the formulation of sentences is substantially different. For answering the second question, we have used 11 text‐matching techniques to evaluate the impact of both descriptions on process matching. Results show (a) the choice of matching technique, and the type of description, have an impact on the matching performance and (b) vector space model (VSM) is the most appropriate matching technique whereas 5 gram is the worst performing technique.

Cognitive Problems in the Oral Chinese Expression of Spanish- Speaking Students: Analysis on the Production of Pauses

For the native speaker, the pause is an essential part of oral communication and has several functions such as indicating the turns between interlocutors, specifying the meaning in an ambiguous expression or marking the phonic or syntactical boundaries. However, inforeigner´s spontaneous discourse the pause is, otherwise, a sign of non-fluency which usually indicates cognitive problems. Based on Levelt’s "Speaking" Model, the present article aims to find out the cognitive problems of the Spanish-speaking students of intermediate and advanced level of Chinese in spontaneous discourse through analyzing the characteristics manifested in the production of pauses. The results show that advanced students have fewer breaks than mid-level students; the total duration of breaks is shorter; the average length of speech is longer and the average of speed is longer. But there is still distance to reach the natives in the mentioned parameters. In addition, those results of the distribution of the breaks reveal that the middle level students pay much attention to the formulation and articulation of short sentences while the advanced ones face problems in the organization of long sentences and therefore they must also pay attention to the self-monitoring.

Cognitive Problems in the Oral Chinese Expression of Spanish- Speaking Students: Analysis on the Production of Pauses

<p>For the native speaker, the pause is an essential part of oral communication and has several functions such as indicating the turns between interlocutors, specifying the meaning in an ambiguous expression or marking the phonic or syntactical boundaries. However, in<span style="font-size: xx-small;">foreigner´s spontaneous discourse the pause is, </span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS,Trebuchet MS; font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS,Trebuchet MS; font-size: xx-small;">otherwise, a sign of non-fluency which usually </span></span><span style="font-size: xx-small;">indicates cognitive problems. Based on Levelt’s "Speaking" Model, the present article aims to </span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS,Trebuchet MS; font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS,Trebuchet MS; font-size: xx-small;">find out the cognitive problems of the Spanish-</span></span><span style="font-size: xx-small;">speaking students of intermediate and advanced level of Chinese in spontaneous discourse through analyzing the characteristics manifested in the production of pauses. The results show that advanced students have fewer breaks than mid-level students; the total duration of breaks is shorter; the average length of speech is longer and the average of speed is longer. But there is still distance to reach the natives in the mentioned parameters. In addition, those results of the distribution of the breaks reveal that the middle level students pay much attention to the formulation and articulation of short sentences while the advanced ones face problems in the organization of long sentences and therefore they must also pay attention to the self-monitoring. </span></p>